Essays in War-Time: Further Studies in the Task of Social Hygiene

By Havelock Ellis

"Essays in War-Time: Further Studies in the Task of Social Hygiene" by Havelock Ellis. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Good Press
• Release date: Nov 26, 2019
• ISBN: 4057664603036

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Havelock Ellis

Essays in War-Time: Further Studies in the Task of Social Hygiene

Published by Good Press, 2022

[e-mail]

EAN 4057664603036

Table of Contents

I — INTRODUCTION

II — EVOLUTION AND WAR

III — WAR AND EUGENICS

IV — MORALITY IN WARFARE

V — IS WAR DIMINISHING?

VI — WAR AND THE BIRTH-RATE

VII — WAR AND DEMOCRACY

VIII — FEMINISM AND MASCULINISM

IX — THE MENTAL DIFFERENCES OF MEN AND WOMEN

X — THE WHITE SLAVE CRUSADE

XI — THE CONQUEST OF VENEREAL DISEASE

XII — THE NATIONALISATION OF HEALTH

XIII — EUGENICS AND GENIUS

XIV — THE PRODUCTION OF ABILITY

XV — MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE

XVI — THE MEANING OF THE BIRTH-RATE

XVII — CIVILISATION AND THE BIRTH-RATE

XVIII — BIRTH CONTROL

I.

REPRODUCTION AND THE BIRTH-RATE

II.

THE ORIGIN AND RESULTS OF BIRTH CONTROL

III.

BIRTH CONTROL IN RELATION TO MORALITY AND EUGENICS

I — INTRODUCTION

Table of Contents

From the point of view of literature, the Great War of to-day has brought us into a new and closer sympathy with the England of the past. Dr. Woods and Mr. Baltzly in their recent careful study of European Warfare, Is War Diminishing? come to the conclusion that England during the period of her great activity in the world has been fighting about half the time. We had begun to look on war as belonging to the past and insensibly fallen into the view of Buckle that in England a love of war is, as a national taste, utterly extinct. Now we have awakened to realise that we belong to a people who have been fighting about half the time.

Thus it is, for instance, that we witness a revival of interest in Wordsworth, not that Wordsworth, the high-priest of Nature among the solitary Lakes, whom we have never forsaken, but the Wordsworth who sang exultantly of Carnage as God's Daughter. To-day we turn to the war-like Wordsworth, the stern patriot hurling defiance at the enemies who threatened our island fortress, as the authentic voice of England.

But this new sense of community with the past comes to us again and again on every hand when to-day we look back to the records of the past. I chance to take down the Epistles of Erasmus, and turn to the letters which the great Humanist of Rotterdam wrote from Cambridge and London four hundred years ago when young Henry VIII had just suddenly (in 1514) plunged into war. One reads them to-day with vivid interest, for here in the supple and sensitive brain of the old scholar we see mirrored precisely the same thoughts and the same problems which exercise the more scholarly brains of to-day. Erasmus, as his Pan-German friends liked to remind him, was a sort of German, but he was, nevertheless, what we should now call a Pacifist. He can see nothing good in war and he eloquently sets forth what he regards as its evils. It is interesting to observe, how, even in its small details as well as in its great calamities, war brought precisely the same experiences four centuries ago as to-day. Prices are rising every day, Erasmus declares, taxation has become so heavy that no one can afford to be liberal, imports are hampered and wine is scarce, it is difficult even to get one's foreign letters. In fact the preparations of war are rapidly changing the genius of the Island. Thereupon Erasmus launches into more general considerations on war. Even animals, he points out, do not fight, save rarely, and then with only those of other species, and, moreover, not, like us, with machines upon which we expend the ingenuity of devils. In every war also it is the non-combatants who suffer most, the people build cities and the folly of their rulers destroys them, the most righteous, the most victorious war brings more evil than good, and even when a real issue is in dispute, it could better have been settled by arbitration. The moral contagion of a war, moreover, lasts long after the war is over, and Erasmus proceeds to express himself freely on the crimes of fighters and fighting.

Erasmus was a cosmopolitan scholar who habitually dwelt in the world of the spirit and in no wise expressed the general feelings either of his own time or ours. It is interesting to turn to a very ordinary, it may be typical, Englishman who lived a century later, again in a period of war and also of quite ordinary and but moderately glorious war. John Rous, a Cambridge graduate of old Suffolk family, was in 1623 appointed incumbent of Santon Downham, then called a town, though now it has dwindled away almost to nothing. Here, or rather at Weeting or at Brandon where he lived, Rous began two years later, on the accession of Charles I, a private diary which was printed by the Camden Society sixty years ago, and has probably remained unread ever since, unless, as in the present case, by some person of antiquarian tastes interested in this remote corner of East Anglia. But to-day one detects a new streak of interest in this ancient series of miscellaneous entries where we find that war brought to the front the very same problems which confront us to-day.

Santon Downham lies in a remote and desolate and salubrious region, not without its attractions to-day, nor, for all its isolation, devoid of ancient and modern associations. For here in Weeting parish we have the great prehistoric centre of the flint implement industry, still lingering on at Brandon after untold ages, a shrine of the archaeologist. And here also, or at all events near by, at Lackenheath, doubtless a shrine also for all men in khaki, the villager proudly points out the unpretentious little house which is the ancestral home of the Kitcheners, who lie in orderly rank in the churchyard beside the old church notable for its rarely quaint mediaeval carvings.

Rous was an ordinary respectable type of country parson, a solid Englishman, cautious and temperate in his opinions, even in the privacy of his diary, something of a country gentleman as well as a scholar, and interested in everything that went on, in the season's crops, in the rising price of produce, in the execution of a youth for burglary or the burning of a woman for murdering her husband. He frequently refers to the outbreak of plague in various parts of the country, and notes, for instance, that Cambridge is wondrously reformed since the plague there; scholars frequent not the streets and taverns as before; but, he adds later on better information, do worse. And at the same time he is full of interest in the small incidents of Nature around him, and notes, for instance, how a crow had built a nest and laid an egg in the poke of the topsail of the windmill.

But Rous's Diary is not concerned only with matters of local interest. All the rumours of the world reached the Vicar of Downham and were by him faithfully set down from day to day. Europe was seething with war; these were the days of that famous Thirty Years' War of which we have so often heard of late, and from time to time England was joining in the general disturbance, whether in France, Spain, or the Netherlands. As usual the English attack was mostly from the basis of the Fleet, and never before, Rous notes, had England possessed so great and powerful a fleet. Soon after the Diary begins the English Expedition to Rochelle took place, and a version of its history is here embodied. Rous was kept in touch with the outside world not only by the proclamations constantly set up at Thetford on the corner post of the Bell Inn—still the centre of that ancient town—but by as numerous and as varied a crop of reports as we find floating among us to-day, often indeed of very similar character. The vicar sets them down, not committing himself to belief but with a patient confidence that time may tell us what we may safely think. In the meanwhile measures with which we are familiar to-day were actively in progress: recruits or voluntaries were being gathered up by the drum, many soldiers, mostly Irish, were billeted, sometimes not without friction, all over East Anglia, the coasts were being fortified, the price of corn was rising, and even the problem of international exchange is discussed with precise data by Rous.

On one occasion, in 1627, Rous reports a discussion concerning the Rochelle Expedition which exactly counterparts our experience to-day. He was at Brandon with two gentlemen named Paine and Howlet, when the former began to criticise the management of the expedition, disputing the possibility of its success and then fell in general to speak distrustfully of the voyage, and then of our war with France, which he would make our King the cause of; and so went on to topics of old popular discontent, of the great cost, the hazard to ships, etc. Rous, like a good patriot, thought it foul for any man to lay the blame upon our own King and State. I told them I would always speak the best of what our King and State did, and think the best too, till I had good grounds. And then in his Diary he comments that he saw hereby, what he had often seen before, that men be disposed to speak the worst of State business, as though it were always being mismanaged, and so nourish a discontent which is itself a worse mischief and can only give joy to false hearts. That is a reflection which comes home to us to-day when we find the descendants of Mr. Paine following so vigorously the example which the parson of Downham reprobated.

That little incident at Brandon, however, and indeed the whole picture of the ordinary English life of his time which Rous sets forth, suggest a wider reflection. We realise what has always been the English temper. It is the temper of a vigorous, independent, opinionated, free-spoken yet sometimes suspicious people among whom every individual feels in himself the impulse to rule. It is also the temper of a people always prepared in the face of danger to subordinate these native impulses. The one tendency and the other opposing tendency are alike based on the history and traditions of the race. Fifteen centuries ago, Sidonius Apollinaris gazed inquisitively at the Saxon barbarians, most ferocious of all foes, who came to Aquitania, with faces daubed with blue paint and hair pushed back over their foreheads; shy and awkward among the courtiers, free and turbulent when back again in their ships, they were all teaching and learning at once, and counted even shipwreck as good training. One would think, the Bishop remarks, that each oarsman was himself the arch-pirate.[1] These were the men who so largely went to the making of the Anglo-Saxon, and Sidonius might doubtless still utter the same comment could he observe their descendants in England to-day. Every Englishman believes in his heart, however modestly he may conceal the conviction, that he could himself organise as large an army as Kitchener and organise it better. But there is not only the instinct to order and to teach but also to learn and to obey. For every Englishman is the descendant of sailors, and even this island of Britain seemed to men of old like a great ship anchored in the sea. Nothing can overcome the impulse of the sailor to stand by his post at the moment of danger, and to play his sailorly part, whatever his individual convictions may be concerning the expedition to Rochelle or the expedition to the Dardanelles, or even concerning his right to play no part at all. That has ever been the Englishman's impulse in the hour of peril of his island Ship of State, as to-day we see illustrated in an almost miraculous degree. It is the saving grace of an obstinately independent and indisciplinable people.

Yet let us not forget that this same English temper is shown not only in warfare, not only in adventure in the physical world, but also in the greater, and—may we not say?—equally arduous tasks of peace. For to build up is even yet more difficult than to pull down, to create new life a still more difficult and complex task than to destroy it. Our English habits of restless adventure, of latent revolt subdued to the ends of law and order, of uncontrollable freedom and independence, are even more fruitful here, in the organisation of the progressive tasks of life, than they are in the organisation of the tasks of war.

That is the spirit in which these essays have been written by an Englishman of English stock in the narrowest sense, whose national and family instincts of independence and warfare have been transmuted into a preoccupation with the more constructive tasks of life. It is a spirit which may give to these little essays—mostly produced while war was in progress—a certain unity which was not designed when I wrote them.

[1] O'Dalton, Letters of Sidonius, Vol. II., p. 149.

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II — EVOLUTION AND WAR

Table of Contents

The Great War of to-day has rendered acute the question of the place of warfare in Nature and the effect of war on the human race. These have long been debated problems concerning which there is no complete agreement. But until we make up our minds on these fundamental questions we can gain no solid ground from which to face serenely, or at all events firmly, the crisis through which mankind is now passing.

It has been widely held that war has played an essential part in the evolutionary struggle for survival among our animal ancestors, that war has been a factor of the first importance in the social development of primitive human races, and that war always will be an essential method of preserving the human virtues even in the highest civilisation. It must be observed that these are three separate and quite distinct propositions. It is possible to accept one, or even two, of them without affirming them all. If we wish to clear our minds of confusion on this matter, so vital to our civilisation, we must face each of the questions by itself.

It has sometimes been maintained—never more energetically than to-day, especially among the nations which most eagerly entered the present conflict—that war is a biological necessity. War, we are told, is a manifestation of the Struggle for Life; it is the inevitable application to mankind of the Darwinian law of natural selection. There are, however, two capital and final objections to this view. On the one hand it is not supported by anything that Darwin himself said, and on the other hand it is denied as a fact by those authorities on natural history who speak with most knowledge. That Darwin regarded war as an insignificant or even non-existent part of natural selection must be clear to all who have read his books. He was careful to state that he used the term struggle for existence in a metaphorical sense, and the dominant factors in the struggle for existence, as Darwin understood it, were natural suitability to the organic and inorganic environment and the capacity for adaptation to circumstances; one species flourishes while a less efficient species living alongside it languishes, yet they may never come in actual contact and there is nothing in the least approaching human warfare. The conditions much more resemble what, among ourselves, we may see in business, where the better equipped species, that is to say, the big capitalist, flourishes, while the less well equipped species, the small capitalist, succumbs. Mr. Chalmers Mitchell, Secretary of the London Zoological Society and familiar with the habits of animals, has lately emphasised the contention of Darwin and shown that even the most widely current notions of the extermination of one species by another have no foundation in fact.[1] Thus the thylacine or Tasmanian wolf, the fiercest of the marsupials, has been entirely driven out of Australia and its place taken by a later and higher animal, of the dog family, the dingo. But there is not the slightest reason to believe that the dingo ever made war on the thylacine. If there was any struggle at all it was a common struggle against the environment, in which the dingo, by superior intelligence in finding food and rearing young, and by greater resisting power to climate and disease, was able to succeed where the thylacine failed. Again, the supposed war of extermination waged in Europe by the brown rat against the black rat is (as Chalmers Mitchell points out) pure fiction. In England, where this war is said to have been ferociously waged, both rats exist and flourish, and under conditions which do not usually even bring them into competition with each other. The black rat (Mus rattus) is smaller than the other, but more active and a better climber; he is the rat of the barn and the granary. The brown or Norway rat (Mus decumanus) is larger but less active, a burrower rather than a climber, and though both rats are omnivorous the brown rat is more especially a scavenger; he is the rat of sewers and drains. The black rat came to Northern Europe first—both of them probably being Asiatic animals—and has no doubt been to some extent replaced by the brown rat, who has been specially favoured by the modern extension of drains and sewers, which exactly suit his peculiar tastes. But each flourishes in his own environment; neither of them is adapted to the other's environment; there is no war between them, nor any occasion for war, for they do not really come into competition with each other. The cockroaches, or blackbeetles, furnish another example. These pests are comparatively modern and their great migrations in recent times are largely due to the activity of human commerce. There are three main species of cockroach—the Oriental, the American, and the German (or Croton bug)—and they flourish near together in many countries, though not with equal success, for while in England the Oriental is most prosperous, in America the German cockroach is most abundant. They are seldom found in actual association, each is best